


In which Gil has an off day

by Overlord_Bethany



Series: Poison in Paris [4]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Paris hijinks, Pre-Canon, and a big horrible monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 04:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12425019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlord_Bethany/pseuds/Overlord_Bethany
Summary: (that's a polite way of saying he gets beat up a bit)





	In which Gil has an off day

Gil could have stayed on the ground, contemplating the ringing in his ears, waiting for the world to right itself. He could have let Captain DuPree handle the three-story-tall monstrosity that had swatted him aside like a wet handkerchief. He  _felt_  a bit like a wet handkerchief, to be entirely honest about it. But the thing was charging, the trap gun had failed, and his friends needed him. 

He lurched to his feet, unsteady, focusing on his own unruly limbs as the city reeled around him. How hard had that thing hit him? Farther down the street, Wooster yelped. Gil squinted, trying to make sense of what he saw. His rattled brains refused. With a shrug, he loped back toward the carnage. 

Clawed limbs wheeled this way and that, making a wreck of the architecture. Colette yelled impolite words about the beast harming her city. That’s fair. Onlookers peered out of buildings, began to gather along the streets. 

That would complicate matters. 

An explosion—that would not have been Colette—shook the street. The creature roared and reared back, shaking its flaming forelimb. DuPree’s work, then. Gil watched with mild interest as the crowd broke beneath the burning debris, only to form up again to the right of the monster. They probably had a better view from there anyway. 

The creature flailed back from another explosion, this one falling a little short. It roared again, then seemed to change its mind about continuing on down the street. It snarled at the crowd. Whoops. 

“Hey!” Waving his arms, Gil increased his pace. “Hey, ugly!” His shouts confused the beast. Its head swung toward him, then back to the crowd. “Over here!”

The monster lashed its tail toward him, the point of which snapped open into four lobes, each sporting a row of barbs. 

Uh-oh. 

Gil lunged to the side, but one of the lobes of the tail-weapon slammed into his shoulder, throwing him to the ground again. Great. He fought for breath, fought the overwhelming sense that he should just close his eyes, perhaps melt a bit into the pavement. Every laborious gasp stung, burned, ached. Something was wrong, but he could not name it, not until he managed to catch his breath. 

Ignoring the pain in his shoulder, Gil tried to sit up. That was when he realized that he could not feel his left hand. Ugh, lovely. With his functional hand, he fumbled to unbutton his shirt. He yanked the bloody fabric away from the wound, and he saw that the skin around the punctures had already turned an unsettling purple-black. Double ugh. 

Some of the crowd had shifted focus from the creature to its victim. “You poor thing!” said a young woman with a large hat and a tenuous grasp of the purpose of corsetry. She leaned over him, and he scuttled backward, discovering in the process that his left foot had also lost sensation. Lovely. 

“Move!” Gil said, and then appreciated how the Paris crowd obeyed first and then afterward looked and shrieked at the massive foot stomping down where they had stood. He struggled to his feet, inadvertently mirroring the way the monster fumbled to turn in the narrow street. It apparently held a grudge over being called ugly. It destroyed a façade, reared back, and roared again. 

“I  _like_  that haberdashery,” complained a too-familiar voice behind Gil. Great. 

“Look who came out to gawk.” Gil rolled his head to the side, trying to give Tarvek a challenging stare, but the numbness was spreading. 

Tarvek’s eyes narrowed. “Are you drunk?”

“You  _would_  say that this early in the afternoon,” Gil scoffed. He contemplated all possible logistics of leaping onto the beast’s back with no feeling in one foot. He took one awkward step forward before a hand on his collar yanked him back. 

“What is wrong with you?” Tarvek spun him about, his gaze falling to Gil’s open shirt, to the blackened flesh there. 

“I got stung by Big Ugly there. Do you mind?”

Tarvek ignored Gil’s attempt to brush him off. “Toxin?” he asked, pulling a vial from one of his pockets. 

Gil lied before he even thought about it. “Some kind of paralytic.” He knew well enough to recognize a powerful neurotoxin, but he figured he could sleep it off with little trouble. 

Tarvek poured the contents of the vial over the puncture wounds. The liquid sizzled when it touched the blackened skin, but Gil felt nothing. 

“What is that stuff?”

“Disinfectant,” Tarvek said, returning the empty vial to his pocket. “Sepsis from monster attack is a useless way to die.”

Gil suspected that Tarvek was lying, but he also had no evidence. Anyway, Tarvek couldn’t possibly know what sort of toxin the creature produced. Not unless he knew how it had been made. Gil gave him a calculating glance. No. Big horrible monsters were just not Tarvek’s style. 

Shrugging his right shoulder, Gil turned back toward the beast. “Well, here goes,” he muttered to himself, but when he started forward, Tarvek yanked him back again. 

“What are you doing? If you get yourself killed today, we all fail that group project on Thursday!”

“I’m not going to die!” Gil argued, irritation getting the better of good sense. “Look at the thing! It can’t even turn around without smashing three shopfronts! Your  _grandmother_  could probably disable it.” He knew he was understating the danger, but the monster did seem as great a hazard to itself as to the public. 

Tarvek arched one eyebrow. “With one hand tied, I have very little doubt,” he said, his expression leaning toward wry. “Not that she would let that happen. Ever.” He grimaced. “ _Now_  what’s wrong with you?”

An excellent question. Gil scowled and failed to mention that his vision had become unstable. Small tremors at intermittent intervals. Ugh. “You’re in my way.”

“The monster is behind you.”

So it was. 

The beast had finally managed to turn. It lowered its head, chin nearly touching the street, and it roared at them. Gil sighed. This was how he had managed to get swatted to the pavement the first time. 

“Fine,” he said to the creature. “Let’s do this.”

“You are out of your mind,” Tarvek objected, catching him by the collar again. 

Probably. Gil attempted to shrug off the hand holding him back. He failed, which did not give him a reasonable amount of faith in his ability to subdue this monster. “Well, somebody has to deal with it.”

“Aren’t some of your degenerate friends around here somewhere?”

A hollow boom resounded down the narrow street, and Gil cast a smirk at Tarvek. “I wouldn’t let Colette hear you say that, if I were you.”

The monster roared. It hesitated, legs seeming to buckle for a moment before it shook off the unseen attack from behind. A second blast knocked it to its knees. 

Gil tried without success to peer past the creature. “I think Colette just field tested her final project for Modular Artillery.”

“Sounded like it,” Tarvek agreed. The monster’s chin dropped to the pavement. “A rousing success, I’d say.”

Gil rubbed at the back of his head. Oh, he had a fairly large bump there. Huh. “We’ll have to move this thing somehow.”

“In pieces?” Tarvek suggested, and Gil gave him a sharp look. 

“You want to make more of a mess? You?”

“Colette’s sonic canon has knocked it down, but it will get back up soon enough. You want to drag this carnage out longer?” Tarvek shot back, glaring. 

Fair point. Gil frowned at his own trap gun, which had jammed or something. “I hope someone has a better idea,” he grumbled, growing irritable as the throbbing in his head began to distract him. 

“Colette probably has a few thoughts.” Tarvek gave Gil a bit of an odd look. “Are you about to fall over?”

Gil opened his mouth to object, but at that moment, the trap gun finally deployed, narrowly missing him. It did ensnare Tarvek, who yelped and hurled rude epithets at Gil. Well. That gave him a better idea of the adjustments he needed to make, at least. He reached into his pockets for tools. 

Behind him, he could hear DuPree and Wooster arguing about what to do with the monster. They would sort it out, he had every confidence. Gil noticed his hand shaking, and he imagined that a wiser man would rest before revising his invention. He wanted to be wise, but he supposed the victim of his device was right to call him an idiot. To yell it, for all of Paris to hear. Not that Gil would ever tell Tarvek so. 

Grinning to himself, Gil got to work.


End file.
